Notes

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The SOAP Builders round V face-to-face meeting was held on October 8-9 at the Sun Campus in Burlington, Massachusetts. This two-day event was attended by 14 companies: Sun Microsystems, Apache Axis (represented by participants from IBM, Macromedia and Computer Associates), Oracle, BEA, Microsoft, Systinet, WebMethods, Mind Reef, Sonic Software, OpenLink and LectroSonics (White Mesa).

Agenda 

• Round-table introductions and network configuration/setup

• An item-by-item discussion and review of the tests proposed in Round IV

• New proposals for SOAP features interop testing

• Actual testing against the various vendor endpoints and coming up with a matrix of test results, with all the identified interoperability issues

The actual event closely reflected the agenda. The only notable difference was that some of the issues discussed on the first day were "parked" (because of no clear resolution and anxiety to start testing) and these issues were re-visited the 2nd day, post lunch, after which the discussions stretched off into the afternoon, with limited testing. Participants started leaving early on Day 2 around 3:30, and the event ended by 4:30.

Arun Gupta spear-headed the preparations, invitations, and logistics. He couldn't participate in the actual event, unfortunately. Vinay Pai first received most of the participants, gave a formal welcome and conducted round-table introductions and helped with the network setup. Quieda Davis (from Karen Tegan's organization) arranged the logistics for the entire event and coordinated with the Customer Briefing Center at Burlington. Doug Kohlert led the event by guiding the participation through the agenda and monitoring/coordinating the various discussions. Marc Hadley participated in the discussions on the first day. Sankar Vyakaranam hosted the Sun's endpoints on his laptop for others to test against, and also ran Sun's clients against the various vendors' endpoints and identified bugs/issues. Sankar also took notes of the proceedings during the event which would later be posted at the Sun's SOAP Builders website and the soapbuilders mailing list.

Details

1. There seems to be emerging a great need to clearly identify and define the SOAP Builders' charter. There were 2 main schools of thought about this :

   • Acknowledge the fact that there is a void and hence a necessity to address the customer (web services developer) needs on certain aspects of/problems with Web Services which are not addressed/satisfied by the Standards bodies (W3C, mainly), because of the slow rate of progress there, amongst other things. That being the case, the SOAP Builders community will attempt to define a solution/standard in that space, which could later either be accepted/blessed by the Standards bodies or become a de facto standard by itself or is superseded/replaced by another one at a future point of time.

   • Keep the work/testing limited to interpretation of the SOAP specification to identify what goes on the wire and validate that.

   Apache seemed to be tending towards the 1^st view while Sun and Microsoft tended towards the second. No official poll was taken, and it was agreed upon that this fundamental point of discussion would be taken up on the mailing list after the participants get back to their companies and possibly talked with their lawyers et al about the IPR and other such issues.
   
   

2. The following are the new interoperability test proposals that came out of this meeting (these endpoints would be tested during the Round 6 face-to-face meeting) :

   • "Extended" echo Base tests covering the other (left-out) built-in types in XML schema - WebMethods

   • Polymorphism in action by virtue of using the xsi:type attribute in the (on the wire) SOAP message - Apache

   • Asynchronous soap messaging - Sonic Software

   • HTTP Fault Codes (SOAP 1.1 based, but using 1.2 for clarification when needed) - Sun Microsystems

   • Extension of Complex Types in schema portion of WSDL - Sun Microsystems

   • Soap Intermediaries - Bob Cunnings of Lectro Sonics

   The agreement with the above "action items" is to do a status check before the end of this year (possibly mid-december) to ensure that progress has been made with the proposals and if not, potentially re-assign them.
   
   

3. Official web-site and registry of SOAP Builders :

   • Fred Hartman from WebMethods brought up the issue about updating the soapbuilders.org website with useful information. The website is currently "owned" by Glen Daniels. But, Glen is going to move the web site to Sam Ruby's machine and Sam would set up Wiki on it and try to get some level of security. The proposals for useful content included :

     • Having access to all the master WSDLs (from all rounds) in one place and possibly having a zip or other compressed, downloadable file containing the master WSDLs from previous rounds which are frozen.

     • SOAPBuilders "Commandments" (phrase used by Glen Daniels), which include those scenarios wherein the SOAPBuilders community agreed upon a certain interpretation/implementation because of lack of or unclear description in a Standard Specification. (Sam Ruby gave an example here of ignoring bits beyond the seconds in xsd:date/time representation)

     • SOAPBuilders "Nuggets" which would include any technical wisdom got thru the interoperability testing.

     • Updated client results

   • Simon Fell's registry service : Sam Ruby volunteered to work with Simon Fell and tidy up the registry to be more useful. It was noted that there are currently some issues with the registry, like invalid information, in-frequently updates/maintenance etc. Also, the registry was to be moved to Sam Ruby's machine, and Sam would also try to set up some kind of notification facility (proposed by Dave Chappell from Sonic Software) on it.
     
     

4. Extensive discussions took place on several SOAP-related features :

   • Sessions : Glen Daniels took up the action item of sending out his proposal for SOAP-based sessions to the soapbuilders alias. David from BEA did a presentation of some of his company's ideas/progress in this direction, but it was considered too heavy-weight and/or out-of-scope. The consensus on this seemed to be "spec only what goes on the wire and the rest is out-of-scope". Microsoft's view on sessions was that talking about sessions using cookies invariably should take the testing into areas like authentication and security.

   • Timezone issues : Alan from OpenLink brought up this issue which caused a debate and the agreement was that the client should really stick in the timezone information in the date data type if it really cares to use that information later on, because omitting it would leave it up to the server implementation to process it in any manner. Secondly, if a request comes in with a non-UTC timezone, the server could either convert it based on UTC or local timezone as long as the value of the time co-ordinate itself is not modified.

   • DataSets : Microsoft, OpenLink and Axis were particularly interested in standardizing the on-the-wire representation of a Dataset.  No consensus was reached here, interested parties would discuss and resolve it on the alias.

   • Maps : Axis is to proceed with its proposal, as majority wanted some thing done in this space (and not wait on Standards bodies). Glen Daniels will be sending out the proposal from Apache to the soapbuilders alias. Meanwhile, David from BEA volunteered to take this proposal and talk to the W3C XML Schema community about blessing it.

   • WS-Routing : It was agreed to be out-of-scope, as of now.
     
     

5. Future Face-to-Face meetings :

   • Microsoft (Yasser Shohoud) volunteered to host the next round of face-to-face meeting in Redmond, WA. The tentative dates are around late February/early March. Yasser is to check back with his company, and propose a couple of possible dates to the mailing list before the end of this year to finalize the event. 

   • It was also generally agreed upon that in the next face-to-face meeting, all the old Rounds (from Round 2 onwards) would be re-visited and tested against (subject to time constraints).

   • WebMethods proposed to host the face-to-face after the Redmond face-to-face in June possibly at their Fairfax, Virginia location (the proposal is on the table and isn't officially accepted/finalized).
     
     

6. Early event feedback : An informal feedback taken towards the end of Day 2 about the event indicated general agreement to the efficiency/success of the event. Two notable "drawbacks", for lack of a better word, were :

   • The sparseness of the final test matrix. This is attributed partly to the lack of ready-to-test endpoints and/or clients by all participating vendors at the event and also to the fact that this face-to-face meeting was predominantly a discussions-dominant event.

   • The lack of internet access was agreed upon to be a major disadvantage to the smooth proceedings and productivity during the discussions/testing of the event.
     
     

7. Miscellaneous :

   • The minutes, the test results matrix, and the pointers to the endpoints for the tests proposed in this round will be hosted on the Sun's soapinterop.java.sun.com website.

   • Leisure : Upon Glen Daniels proposal, most of the participants (modulo a few, with prior plans) went out to a nearby sea food place, "Naked Fish" at the end of Day 1 proceedings.

Click here to view the list of all attendees.

Click here to view the test matrix.

For more information, please contact web master.